Will Europe’s new creators of Christian imagery be allowed to push the boundaries of what Christian art can represent and to whom it might speak? Nativity scenes bring into focus two defining questions of our time: who belongs, and how far belonging can stretch.

Call-out culture was alive and well in the Victorian Era: the first-ever commercial Christmas greeting card was viewed as scandalous by British teetotalers for ostensibly promoting underage drinking.

These days, Santa sightings typically happen in abandoned malls, holiday markets, and other consumerist nightmares. But in 1863, the best chance of spotting Santa would have been behind Union lines.

As a counterpart to Saint Nicholas, who preceded the more approachable Santa Claus, the demonic Krampus was evoked in Central Europe for centuries as a warning to kids to be good — or else.

Photographer Danelle Manthey frames the practice of Christmas decoration as a kind of folk art in the book “American Christmas.” Peace on earth and installation art for all!

There are few small pleasures more delightful than a holiday card from a friend. Cards made by artists like Claes Oldenburg, Ad Reinhardt and Philip Guston each reflect the unique personality of their makers.

Nativity scenes are inherently political. They declare that God dwells in the lowliest of places, among the marginalized and dispossessed. That’s the true spirit of the holidays.

Christmas in 1950 was a low time for Langston Hughes. So instead of giving his friends Christmas gifts, he sent out typewritten postcards that expressed his financial state, and enduring holiday cheer.

From a nostalgic children’s tale that treats holiday stories with an artistic touch to a classic horror film, here are our offbeat picks for Christmas movies to help spark memories (or family feud) this season!

The Art Tarotscope is customized to your astrological element to help you navigate this time of winter. For this winter solstice, we read with the Thaw, a special spread offered by the tarot platform Moonlight.

Faith Ringgold’s words have rhythm. The late artist was a storyteller and visual artist in equal measure — her knack for prose and her herculean visual skills go hand in hand.

Joseph Cornell longed for Paris, but ultimately never visited. A new devotional exhibition curated by Wes Anderson and Jasper Sharp recreates the late artist’s workspace at Gagosian gallery’s storefront in the city of love.

Reactionaries like to grumble about a so-called War on Christmas, but what would these contemporary boot-lickers think of Botticelli’s politically radical “Madonna of the Magnificat” (c. 1483)?

Some publications worship the powerful. Hyperallergic stands by the powerless. Welcome to the 2025 edition of the Most Powerless People in the Art World, our antidote to the asinine lists of wealthy collectors, royals, and “tastemakers” that pervade market-driven art media.

The British Museum has launched a long-term loans program that sent 80 Greek and Egyptian antiquities to India in “a rebranding exercise that preserves colonial power structures while pretending to dismantle them,” writes Emiline Smith.

This Christmas season — defined by political division, xenophobic and draconian immigration policies, and displacement and genocides — the nativity scene has once again become an unlikely ground zero for dissent.

Families, even the godly ones, have been messy since Ancient Egypt. Allow us to walk you through the incestuous, murderous, and surprisingly relatable world of “Divine Egypt” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In a new letter, the White House renewed its threat to withhold funding from the Smithsonian unless it hands over programming plans and other documents to be evaluated for their commitment to celebrating “American exceptionalism.”

Banksy’s latest mural in a quiet London neighborhood depicts a pair of bundled-up children stargazing — possibly a reference to the more than 100,000 unhoused children in the nation’s capital.

While an exhibition at the Morgan Library offers a beautiful and instructive display of manuscript artistry, it risks presenting a sanitized vision of the book's history, glossing over the fundamental power dynamics and conflicts inherent in medieval religious life.

Hildegard von Bingen’s visual idiom of the concept “viriditas” relied on certain shapes and colors, often conveyed through earthly green and celestial blue.

Even in the down year of 1950, Langston Hughes’s Christmas Cards show his writing wit still bristling. For those who may have had a hard year leading up to these winter holidays, there’s some defiant joy to glean from his wry greetings.

"Dear Mayor-Elect Mamdani: As you remake New York into a better home for all those forgotten by the politics of our city, remember this: Arts and culture are the very vehicles through which we express the power to shape our destinies." –Sami Abu Shumays, deputy director of Flushing Town Hall

If you need any further proof that the world has gone topsy-turvy, look no further than the theft of an icon of the baby Jesus from a nativity scene in Grand Place in the Brussels city center in late November.

A controversial monument to "victims of communism" in Ottawa will be altered after the Canadian government reportedly discovered potential Nazi affiliations among the commemorated individuals.

Mary Anne Carter, the Trump-appointed former chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, will return for a second term as the administration continues to gut the agency.

Through his video game installation, artist Lu Yang multiplies into gods, demons, and monsters, enacting a ritual shedding of self. Turning scans of his own body into an idol, he becomes both worshipper and worshipped.

What is it we are longing for in the society that led us to this moment? Is it desperation? Food Insecurity? Economic anxiety? Three artists offer their personal takes.

Not the least bit surprising given the cost to produce and frame work for museum exhibitions. Unless you are highly successful, artists pay for these production costs themselves. Even with a sponsorship framing deal my Griffin Museum exhibitions cost me over $20K to produce.

“In Berlin, I thought I’d found a safe place to make art, not realizing I’d entered a theatre where most perform the role of the liberated artist, with work as deep as the Instagram carousel for which it was made.” –Day Eve Komet, poet and performer

A survey of more than 1,000 artists found that 56% of participants are mired in debt. What’s worse is that this number climbs to 59% for those with gallery representation and museum shows under their belt.

The exhibition “From Gaza to the World” brings together works by 25 Palestinian artists. Catch it at Recess in Brooklyn before it closes this weekend, and revisit Diba Mohtasham’s report from the opening in September.

Considering grad school? We’ve organized a list of arts-related MFA, MA, and PhD programs to explore and apply to before their deadlines early next year!

Artist Hortensia Mi Kafchin thinks like a historian by folding elements of the past — drawn both from human history and her own life — into a vision of what humanity could achieve, if we could only pull together in one life-affirming direction.

Nan Goldin’s fearless Berlin retrospective, a remapping of interwar Paris in Singapore, Noah Davis’s visions of Black life, and a meditation on monuments in LA were just some of our favorite art shows around the world this year.

Tuan Andrew Nguyen was tapped for the High Line commission, the Whitney revealed the artists in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, PAIN’s Megan Kapler is heading to Housing Works, and more news from the art world in this week’s Art Movements.

Crusader imagery has long been co-opted by far-right nationalist, fascist, and white supremacist groups. Twenty-first-century Crusadercore, however, is unique in the rapidity with which it has escalated and expanded into non-Catholic circles.

Between unreliable hours and varying wages, art models are struggling to cobble together a living, despite the consequential role they play in visual arts institutions across the US.

How much interaction did the Romans have with Ancient India? The discovery of graves for pet monkeys on the Egyptian coast suggest that some Romans, including soldiers, likely kept exotic pets in their households.

The fast-paced cycle of policy changes, executive actions, and judicial rulings makes it hard to stay up-to-date on what’s happening within art institutions. So we compiled a month-by-month recap of how US politics impacted the cultural sector in 2025.

Workers at LACMA, the largest museum in the Western United States, voted to unionize. In a missive to the board, staff noted that salaries had failed to keep up with the rising cost of living in Los Angeles.

In Memoriam this week, we honor the conceptual artist Ceal Floyer, the filmmaker and activist Christine Choy, photographer Michele Singer Reiner, and Roberta Fallon, cofounder of Artblog.

Karoline Leavitt, like all of the politicians Chris Anderson photographed for that Vanity Fair article, has remade herself in Trump’s image. Anderson’s camera captured exactly what that costs.

Of the artists known as the NEA Four, Karen Finley is the one whose full name most people remember. There’s something about her work that touches on how reality TV stars today, specifically women, become briefly famous for heavily sexualized moments of notoriety.

When Theaster Gates opens a gap between how something is perceived and what it is, he does not simply make a connection for the viewer — he invites speculation and self-reflection. That’s when he attains a different kind of greatness.

Our specific worries change with age, but the core anxiety stays the same — that our intrinsic value doesn’t align with our culture’s values. But people believe in a lot of toxic shit you don’t have to buy into.

By applying tenebrism — an extreme form of chiaroscuro — to nighttime depictions of 18th-century science experiments, Joseph Wright of Derby portrayed dramatic moments of intellectual and moral revelation.

Displaying juvenilia from established artists adds name recognition to the 2025 California Biennial, but says little about adolescents today. The show’s broad strokes paint a portrait of youth that mirrors an after school special more than the real world.

It’s “not a museum,” and, according to its architects, it’s “not a building.” But a cool subterranean lair on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway now houses a shifting collection of floating mobiles and grand stabiles by the modernist master Alexander Calder.

As 2025 draws to an end, we look back on the 10 best art films of the year: Highlights include a Peter Hujar interview brought to life, a documentary about three influential single-mother artists, and Kelly Reichardt’s art heist drama.